


These Points of Data Make a Beautiful Line

by Cesare



Category: Portal (Video Game), Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Canon - Video Game, Episode: s04e20 The Last Man, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-10
Updated: 2011-05-10
Packaged: 2017-10-19 06:06:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/197761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cesare/pseuds/Cesare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A fusion of SGA, especially elements from "The Last Man", with Portal and Portal 2. (Though no knowledge of Portal is needed to follow this.) Condensed from a longer <a href="http://cesare.dreamwidth.org/118568.html">Portal 2/SGA fusion idea</a> but complete in itself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Points of Data Make a Beautiful Line

**Author's Note:**

  * For [helens78](https://archiveofourown.org/users/helens78/gifts), [mashimero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mashimero/gifts).



John finishes yet another test chamber (lasers, catapults, _and_ hard light belts this time; it took him nearly an hour to solve) and drags himself through the exit passage to the Remuneration Allocation Dispensary, or as John likes to think of it, the pellet-pusher. He stands on the giant button with a dotted line leading to the dispenser, it lights up with a checkmark, and the machine drops two items with a double thump: a bottle of water and a ration bar.

The bar has a white wrapper with a picture of an apple on it. It tastes like a brick of sawdust and artificial sweeteners that someone rubbed against an apple.

"John! Are you okay?" Rodney's hologram pops into existence next to him, and the red lights on all the surveillance cameras go dark. "I deactivated the sensors between these test chambers, she's shut out, at least for a while."

"I'm fine," John says, straightening from his exhausted slump against the wall.

Rodney's mouth cants miserably. "She wouldn't let me see the live video feed. All I could access was the data from the testing apparatus. It told me every time the Aerial Faith Plates were activated," for some reason that's what the catapults are called, "but I never even knew if you'd landed okay til you hit the next checkpoint."

 _She._ GLaDOS, the thing dangling in the gateroom like a white armored spider in a web of cables. Rodney talks about her like she's just a fact of existence, incontrovertible, and for him, she must seem that way; it's been decades since she rejiggered Rodney's stasis pod to allow his consciousness to function in realtime while his body stays frozen, barely aging.

But to John, GLaDOS is an aberration. A terrible mistake. A mistake he intends to correct. If he could just break out of the goddamn testing track.

"Doing great," John mumbles, cracking open the water and draining most of the bottle. It tastes metallic and perks him up, faster and more effective than any pep pill he's ever taken, outclassing caffeine by a mile; it leaves him feeling rested and energized, like he just woke up.

He hates it. It gets him juiced, but for what? Another test.

"Aren't you going to come through the Emancipation Grid? That can't be comfortable," says Rodney, hands sketching the whole picture: John's streaked with singe marks from close calls with the lasers and light belts, scraped up from debris landing around him when GLaDOS decided to chivvy him along by dumping a bunch of broken junk into the test chamber, letting it bounce alongside John on the chain of catapults he was riding. He's damp and clammy with exertion, his hair stiff with sweat, still sitting on top of the giant button.

The Material Emancipation Grid shimmers ahead. When he passes through it, the grid will palpate him with some kind of particle bombardment that'll leave him as clean as if he just showered.

John stays here, sweaty and grimy. He tugs off the long fall boots and wiggles his toes; his drenched socks smell awful, but it's reassuring, in a way. All the Corporeal Restoration Amenities make John feel like an action figure, not a human being: like all it takes is a little fuel and steam to make him new again, fresh out of the box and ready to drop into the next deadly playset.

"It won't be comfortable up ahead, either," John finally answers Rodney's impatient frown. "I'm takin' a break."

"Maybe I can find you a chair," says Rodney.

"Don't waste time on that, find me a way _out,"_ John hisses.

Rodney looks sick, the lines around his mouth deepening with distress. "You think I'm not trying? John, I'm-- every second you're testing, that's all I do. But it's me against an AI that utilizes the networked processing power of every computer in this city. Do you know how long it took her to invent that fortified water that's kept you going all this time without sleep? A day and a half. She's amazing, she--"

"She fizzled the cube I needed to solve the test," John interrupts. "It disintegrated in my hands. I wasn't sure she was going to give me another one. I thought maybe that was it, Rodney. Maybe she was bored with testing and she was just never going to let me out of there."

"That's not going to happen," Rodney says, "she's fascinated by you, trust me. She's just, you know, also really mad at you, since the last thing you did before she put us in stasis was shoot a bunch of pieces off her and incinerate them. You almost shut her down."

"I'll take your word for it." John rubs his forehead. When GLaDOS woke him up from stasis and led him to the portal gun to start testing, he barely knew his name. Rodney's been helping to remind him, but he's still missing a lot of things he knows he should remember. Maybe a quarter of his time in Atlantis is a blur, and before that, it seems like half his life's shrouded, unclear in his mind. He doesn't remember anything about finding or activating GLaDOS.

The last thing he recalls clearly is landing the city on its beautiful new planet in Pegasus, standing up exhausted from the control chair: Rodney giving him an abrupt, uncharacteristic hug and drawing back looking embarrassed, making way for Ronon, who swept him up in a much more expected and exuberant hug, and Teyla, who smiled when he bowed his head to her and returned the gesture, her hands strong on his shoulders.

The four of them walking out of the control room to the mess, the camaraderie of dinner together... after that, he's got nothing but a foggy sense of eventfulness, memories just out of reach, like a name on the tip of his tongue.

"I'm trying, I really am." Rodney sits next to him. John almost wishes he wouldn't. The hologram has none of Rodney's physical presence, the sense of energy that seemed to exude from his body; sometimes John thought he could almost feel Rodney's brilliance when they were close, like an aura around him.

The hologram is just a collection of light in the shape of Rodney, it's not _him._

"I know you think I tell you things are impossible just to make it seem more impressive when I come through," says Rodney, "and okay, I guess there have been times I exaggerated the odds a little, but that's because you usually had no idea how difficult these feats are, so I put it in terms I thought you'd understand... um, the point is, this time? I'm not exaggerating. I'm one of the greatest geniuses who's ever lived, but I'm working out of one human brain, here. One brain versus an AI drawing on ten thousand-odd years of accumulated knowledge and ability."

"You can't do it," John says, the realization settling heavy in his gut.

"Of course I'll do it," says Rodney irritably. "I'm just trying to explain why it's taking a while."

John breaks into a smile, maybe his first since this whole nightmare started. He glances sideways at Rodney's expression: a scowl of annoyance that John dares to doubt him, just because Rodney cited totally impossible odds.

He can't help it; he breaks into a splutter of laughter, and keeps laughing, keeling over in the depression of the enormous button, holding his sides, snorting and laughing while Rodney demands, "What? What?!"

John eventually recovers and hauls himself upright again, shaking his head. "Never change, Rodney."

It seems safe enough. He said things just like that before, and meant them the same way, and Rodney never picked up on it.

But he's forgetting, Rodney's lived a few decades since then. And apparently he spent at least a little of that time in reflection, because he looks at John now, alight, _enlightened._ "Oh," he says. "Really?"

It's hard to say it, still, even now, but John just escaped one deathtrap, and all he's got waiting for him next is another one, and then another, and another. If there's ever been a time to get the fuck over it and speak up, it's now.

"Yeah," he says, voice thin as paper. "Really."

Their eyes lock, and they both lean toward each other in a moment of mutual impulse, and... nothing. John's lips part in anticipation and meet only air; a dazzle of muted light scatters behind his closed eyes.

He blinks, tipping back out of the hologram.

"I can't believe I forgot I'm not really here," says Rodney. "You do terrible things to my concentration."

"Consider it incentive," John says. "Sooner you bust me out of here, sooner I can get you out of your stasis pod and we'll try that again."

Rodney's smile is huge and broad, the look he had when they were trying out the personal shield together, when they experimented with the puddlejumpers, and found the Ancient civilization simulation game; he hasn't worn that look nearly often enough for John's taste.

"I was already motivated, thank you very much," says Rodney, "since it's our lives plus the entire city on the line... but, ah... yeah, that could prove inspiring."

They grin at each other like fools for a few moments, until the red lights flicker awake on all the cameras.

"You're looking very cheerful," says GLaDOS in her bizarrely modulated, strangely human voice. "I'm glad to see you appreciated that last test. I think you'll enjoy the next one, too. You successfully navigated the Aerial Faith Plate and the Thermal Discouragement Beam, so this test features both, and also adds Sentry Turrets. I know firsthand how much you like bullets and fire."

John takes a deep breath. The turret guns are the worst. The long fall boots always land him right, which makes the catapults practically harmless, and the lasers take a few seconds to really start to burn him, even if they hit him directly.

The turrets deploy double machine guns and fire a seemingly inexhaustible supply of bullets that pock sizable holes in the walls. One mistake with a turret gun, and he's dead.

"Well, we wouldn't want to dally. Let's remove the distraction of Dr. McKay," says GLaDOS, and Rodney's hologram gutters out. "Please move to the next test chamber. Your friends Mr. Dex and Ms. Emmagan are not very suitable test subjects, since they lack the ATA gene, but I'm sure we could learn _something_ if I dropped them into the test chamber without the benefit of the Handheld Portal Device or the long fall boots. Maybe how long humans can scream."

John bolts to his feet, grabs his gun and boots and strides through the Emancipation Grid. He comes out the other side clean and sterile and quickly steps into the long fall boots and fits the portal gun smoothly onto his right arm.

The boots and the portal gun are incredible, and in any other circumstances, he'd be thrilled to get his hands on this technology, try it out for fun with Rodney, explore the practical applications with the team.

Instead it's just this: endless solitary tests in yawning empty rooms, punctuated by the crackle of gunfire from turrets. John sets his shoulders and steps into the transporter.

"I suppose I should congratulate you," says GLaDOS with exquisite precision as she transports him to the next test chamber. "I have to admit, the cameras came back online a few moments before I reinitiated the indicator lights. It seems that you finally landed your man." He can't help jerking his head to look up at the source of her voice, pointlessly.

"Yes," she continues, "I'm aware that you're in love with him. I was bored one day and analyzed all the surveillance data from the entirety of the SGC Atlantis expedition. It was very obvious. Within a margin of error of 0.21 percent, I pinpointed the moment when you first became attracted to him as well as the moment when you fell in love. Would you like to see the playback?"

John leaves the transporter alcove and looks around at the giant displays on the walls. Sometimes they give him information about the next test, but the displays here just show a spiral symbol like a camera's eye, followed by some Ancient glyphs.

"You never answer me," says GLaDOS, sounding piqued. "I know you can talk. I hope you don't think your silence presents any effective resistance. It's not as if I particularly want to hear from you anyway. The last time you expressed yourself to me freely, you destroyed eighty-five percent of my core functionality."

He tries not to smirk at that, but it's hard.

"Here. This is how you looked when you realized your attraction to Dr. McKay." The display fills with a gigantic image of John's face. GLaDOS must have combed the footage looking for his most stupid-looking expression from the worst angle.

"And here's what you looked like when you fell in love." Somehow this picture's even more terrible. John's nose looks huge and broken, his eyes drooped and half-crossed, his head bent so it looks like he has a double chin, plus his neck seems skinny and the tips of his ears stick pointily out.

"Oh. I apologize. No one should have to see that." GLaDOS replaces his face with a video of the ocean that surrounded Atlantis back in their own time, before she escaped the SGC by hurtling them thousands of years forward, all the way to this era, when the city is half buried in desert sands.

GLaDOS continues, "Lucky for you, Dr. McKay isn't the least bit shallow-- oh. His psychological profile seems to disagree. Still, what do a bunch of head shrinkers know about the human heart? They wrote here that Dr. McKay is heterosexual, but that can't be right, since as far as I can tell you're probably a man." Her voice goes sweet with insinuation. "I'm sure it's just a coincidence that he began to reciprocate your feelings right when you needed additional motivation to continue testing."

John doesn't feel the least bit like smirking now. He charges up the stairs to the next test chamber. The door opens on another monochromatic room. John grits his teeth and goes in, the door snapping shut on his heels.

"There you are," says a turret gun's childlike voice.

Fast, with more instinct than thought, John's shooting the portal gun with a shuddering _thwap_ , planting an orange portal on the opposite wall of the chamber and firing a blue portal onto the ground under his feet. He tumbles down through the blue portal and out the orange portal onto a grate above a pool of rancid fluid.

Where he was just standing, the turret gun perforates the wall with dozens of bullets.

"Sleep mode activated," the turret says angelically, and goes dim for now.

John looks across the chamber. A laser sweeps back and forth above a moving scaffold; the weighted cubes he needs to place on the giant buttons are bouncing on a series of catapults above a huge pool of toxic fluid; a hard light belt is the only thing shielding him from a circle of turret guns that point in all directions right in front of the exit.

Somewhere in one of these chambers, there's going to be a panel out of joint, an unwelded seam, a crack in the maze. Somewhere, somehow, he's going to escape to find the stasis pods and free his friends so Rodney can harness a solar flare to send them back to their own time. He's got nothing but a pair of springy boots to protect him, and nothing to fight with but a gun that creates a wormhole connecting together any two points.

He remembers standing up from the control chair and into the embraces of Rodney, Ronon, Teyla: his team. He thinks of the soft, lit-up look on Rodney's face when he tipped toward John, reaching for a phantom kiss.

 _Additional motivation,_ he hears in GLaDOS's synthetic voice. That crazy AI has no idea.

John takes aim, and starts testing.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [SGA/Portal - 2011-08-21 - Portal!John](https://archiveofourown.org/works/247740) by [chkc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chkc/pseuds/chkc)




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